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He didn't remember his mother's face, not since he was a teen, not really since he was a child. There had been a warmth in his life, maternal but not enough to be motherly and it was when he was laying on the soft, cushioned couch with Eleazar's voice guiding him through his own mind, that Jamie remembered his aunt.
She was dead, that was the first thing he knew completely. Then it was her, standing in the the threshold of her apartment and looking at him with her wise, joyful eyes. She was tall enough to almost take up the entire length of the doorway, plain but so incredibly intelligent. Jamie got his hair and his eyes from his father's side, leaving him in opposites to his mother's and thus his aunt. She was like the earth, fair haired but eyes the colour of wet mud.
He had never thought of her so clearly before, unsure if he could really take it for truth but he was glad that he was able to keep this much of her. He could see her laugh, her smile and the sadness in it as she soothed him during his episodes as a boy, inconsolable to anyone but her. Back then, he wasn't the only one his nightmares kept up at night.
"You're distracted," came Eleazar's voice, sudden enough to vanish her away. "You need to concentrate on branching out."
Jamie opened his eyes, blinking deliberately at the white ceiling then turning his head to look at Eleazar. It had been two weeks since he had begun trying to reign in control of himself, of his 'gift', all to little success. It had been like trying to push himself out from his body, eliciting a headache that wasn't quite a headache but aching enough to stop.
"Don't strain yourself," they all told him, watching as he seethed in silence at his inability to do what had haunted him throughout life. When he needed his terrors most, they left him and no longer able to sleep, Jamie was victim to his own imagination.
There were the times when it was calm, like the surface of undisturbed water. Jamie would stay floating above it for as long as he could, listening to nothing and seeing nothing and he thought that he could stay there forever. Then there were times when the water would rise, hotter than it should be and soaking him tightly until he could do nothing but watch a life that was once his own.
His mother, faceless. His aunt, comforting. Susanna, dead. There were others, passing him by in blurs. Moments too, flickering quickly across his eyes as if someone was clicking their fingers. Some stayed with him a while after had woken himself from his thoughts, wondering if they really were memories or if they were only figments spun by his mind.
There was one that had kept him quiet for days, laying and practicing but never getting far because of the flash of human life that reminded him of a turning moment from his time before death.
The woman, he remembered, had lost consciousness with Jamie's hands trying to stop the blood. He had wrapped a dishtowel around her arm, slit from elbow to wrist with the bladed edge of a pair of scissors. He had hunted her husband, nightmares of scared little girls and their tied hands and cut skin. He had heard their cries long after he had awoken and he himself had cried, curled upon the bed and weeping until he was sick.
